Particularly in the hospital environment in its different areas such as ICU (Intensive Care Unit), OR (Operating Room), ER (Emergency Room) and floor, patients may constantly receive drug deliveries in order to control their vital signs or diseases. The same principles apply to hospital environment or even at patient's home. Today, most of the control of such operations is manual, and therefore prone to error and inaccuracy.
Drugs accomplish a variety of tasks for medical practice, such as bringing the patient to a desired state of vital signs, anaesthesia level, infection control and others. Patients constantly receive medication, especially when they are in a hospital, and especially when they are in an operating room or ICU and Emergency Area. Monitoring the administration of drugs, saving information and any further treatment of data are critical for a correct medical treatment.
Today, monitoring of medical drug administration is mostly performed manually, either by the hospital personnel or the doctor. Such manual operations are subject to the personnel criteria and might not be properly recorded. In fact, sometimes drug delivery is done under great stress, like in the operating room, ICU or emergency areas, and monitoring falls into a lower priority task and therefore potentially skipped. This might be a problem for the patient but also to the hospital management, which does not acknowledge this drug delivery neither in their medical history nor in their financial records.
Adding an automatic monitoring system to control such drug deliveries has several benefits for the safety of the stakeholders.
For patients: reduced anxiety through a higher level of control, higher level of control for hospital personnel, more accurate drug tracking, and also, in the case of self-medication, this kind of system could be of help for those with certain impairments, such as visual impairment.
For the hospital personnel (doctors/nurses): extra layer of control, which adds to the doctor's manual control, an automatic confirmation of operations, an increase drug delivery accuracy, alleviation of manual tasks, streamlining of operations, letting the doctor focus on other tasks, and also, linked to the monitoring system, it can estimate which amount of drug is necessary and its potential automation. For hospitals and sanitary centres: highest standards of operation delivered to their patients, control and tracking of operations for compliance, and the ability to precisely bill all used materials for a certain patient. For pharmaceutical companies: accurate track of drug usage, compliance, reduced incidents due to liability, and extensive laboratory data on the field available.
There is several known automatic medication delivery machines currently used which cover a small part of the medication that need to be delivered to a patient imposing the restrictions above mentioned of using automatic drug delivery machines. This is not practical for most of medication, both in the operating room, ICU, emergency and the hospital room.
It has been disclosed in patent US20060178578—Vision system to calculate a fluid volume in a container—an automatic delivery system, which uses a linear sensor to monitor the syringe. This system interferes in the current medical practice, as the doctor cannot insert manually the medication into the patient but needs to use the delivery machine to do so. Such machine does not allow freedom to the doctor to react to patient needs with appropriate timing.
The document US 2007/0239482 relating to a “Vision Based Data Acquisition System and Method For Acquiring Medical and Other Information” discloses generic camera-based methods to control everything that happens in an operating room. However, no further detail on which is the acquisition system that will allow the correct visualization of the medication process nor how the image is processed to reach the variables of interest-type of medication, injected volume. The document discloses a system that
has generic cameras on top of the room that record everything, but such system has not the image definition nor the correct angulation to be able to identify the administered drug nor its volume, i.e. has an automatic imaging process system that automatically tracks the delivered drug.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,651,775A proposes a system to track medication administration based on a cradle for each syringe, and a table to place all administration syringes. Specifically this patent proposes a system that:                requires a cradle to set the syringe        The reader, even if it is a 2D camera is aligned laterally to the syringe        
These characteristics limit the maneuverability of caregivers and forces them to change the way they operate today. Inserting the syringe in the proposed system in this patent might be time consuming.
US2001/0056258 is pretty similar to U.S. Pat. No. 5,651,775A, in which a cradle, a supporting device and a linear array are needed, limiting the degree of operation of the caregiver. In the embodiment with camera, it is placed alongside of the syringe, in a parallel plane.
US2002/0099334 seems an adaptation to a manually operated device, but still needs the use of a cradle and a holding device, making it very unpractical for current medical practice.
US2012/0268741 A1 proposes an invention to measure the plunger position through an optical system. Most of the embodiments propose a linear arrangement for either the lighting array or the sensor array, falling into the disadvantages cited for the previous documents (e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 5,651,775A). In fact, claim 1 states a linear element. There are some embodiments which take a measure solely from the back of the syringe, which also limits the maneuverability of the device, and also poses serious technical concerns on how this device would work when the hand of the caregiver is administering the dose. Also, the medication needs to be translucent, which is not always the case in usual medial practice.
US2011/0112474 proposes a measuring device that allows caregiver to operate freely. It introduces the limitation that it needs to be held with one hand. For the ID, it proposes several technologies. For the optical option, it is proposed a code in the head of the syringe, with the following disadvantages:                the need for particular, maybe proprietary, syringes and/or IV lines to incorporate the sensor;        the need for particular, maybe proprietary, labels. Although it's mentioned that they could be printed in a regular office printer, it would technically challenging to hold them in such small space in a real environment;        As the space is small, the amount of information that can be encoded is small;        It requires an extra label for ID, besides the one mandatory by regulation for caregivers.        
In view of the prior art, there is still the need for finding new means for an automatic monitoring system in addition to the doctor's manual operation through a device for monitoring the manual administration of medication.